Projecting confidence via smiling

Low self-confidence is counterproductive. The recommended approach is “fake it till you make it”. Smiling is a simple way to increase projected confidence and confidence in a wider sense. Clearly, a simple grin will be counterproductive, so smiling should be more subtle. More reading here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

“Fake it till you make it” concept

As humans, we do not like ambiguity. If we have two contradicting concepts, we eventually try to choose one – even if we have to pay a price for it. Thus it should not be surprising that we can create fake identities that become authentic with very little training.

For example, if we smile physiologically by the force of our will, the brain will try to resolve the ambiguity by finding a reason to smile. The brain is so complex, that it will even find a reason to smile that matches that smile that we use.

Confident smile

To project confidence we need to smile with confidence. It is not a big grin, but a subtle movement of the outside corners of the lips up matched by cheeks going slightly upwards and not sideways. If you are not sure, remember the “Mona Lisa smile” Leonardo Davinci was so famous for.

The movement of lips is not necessary. One can project confidence simply via gaze. Simply this way requires more training – like visualizing looking at a burning candle.

When I looked online for a “confident smile” I got many images of overconfident smiles, showing full dental work. Showing teeth while smiling can be considered overconfident or even aggressive in some cultures. Overconfidence is usually worse than low confidence – it is a sign of a clueless jerk.

Avoid overconfidence

It is quite hard to maintain balance, and it is often easier to go from one extreme to an opposite, and often worse one. Balanced confident behavior often comes with a smile of “everything is under control” but equally often with a smile of humility.

The difference is often quite small. Humble people do not keep eye contact for more than several moments, often look down and focus on everything but themselves. “Humble stars” are probably the best people to manage and work with, even though they might not be noticed immediately.

Overconfidence does not come with competence, quite the opposite. Overconfident people are often marked as jerks by their peers. Most people do not see overconfidence as a defensive mechanism: a jerk is a jerk. Due to the projected overconfidence, the person may get a task beyond his capabilities. Then when given a task with real responsibility, an overconfident person is likely to fail with grave results for anyone who supported him.

It is typically best not to project overconfidence and even fake some level of humility when the task is very simple.

In Greek tragedy, the macho leader usually suffered. In a comedy, a simple humble man would often rise to greatness and outwit his way through anything life would throw. Maybe the Greeks knew something about life all too well.

Dealing with low self-confidence

Several ways of dealing with low self-confidence are facilitated by humor.

1. Irrelevance. All the doubts we may have are subjective. They might be irrelevant to what needs to be done. If people believed that we try to do something stupid they would dissuade us. A relevant joke is called “parable of the  drowning man.” We do not need a direct divine intervention to reach our goals. Everything we need is likely to be already available.
2. Doing nothing. If we see some signs that we should not attempt something, these signs are likely to disappear the next day. A biblical story about it is the story of the walls of Jericho. They were impossible to penetrate, so the army did not do much except pray loud with trumpets. We can only assume what work was hidden by the sounds of trumpets. After seven days, the walls fell and the city was conquered.
3. Taking on new, more difficult challenges.  If low self-confidence is limited only to specific activities, doing something different and more complex may help. There is an Indu story about a man who learned to walk on the water. His secret was a total belief in his master’s abilities. The master was so inspired by his student, that he also tried to walk on the water and drowned. The student commented: it is a pity that his master’s master was not as powerful as his own.
4. Radically admitting patterns of mistakes to yourself. Laughing wholeheartedly at your own limitations is one of the ways to self-compassion and actualization. Allow others to laugh at you and then join them. Sounds strange, but works for me.

Experiment with more confident body language and tone of voice

If the smile is not enough, you can try to use other elements of body language. Usually, more open body language signals confidence. Projecting voice from the diaphragm also helps. There is an NLP exercise called “circle of confidence”, where simply visualizing some change in some physical area of the room may project the desired change.

Smiling is just the most direct tool to generate a projection of confidence. It is not the most powerful or the subtlest of approaches. Typically it is advised to mix and match various kinds of behaviors for the best result.

Work on your self-control

In Eastern cultures, a calm confident smile projects self-control.  The opposite is often uncontrollable anger. Anger provides access to some extra strength,  but it increases the chances of very bad mistakes and enables reading of the behavior. People skilled in martial arts, poker or entertainment, often hide their inner state behind a well-trained smile and try to reduce the pulse. When they get too agitated, they often diffuse it with an insider joke.

This situation often happens in Manga comics, but it is not a myth. Calming yourself down with a well-practiced smile is one of the best ways to avoid total humiliation.

Emotional contagion

We can with practice turn an artificial smile into a genuine one. This is not very simple, but doable. It is easier to start with a genuine smile. The best way to do that is getting a smile from somebody else.

I literally walk around thinking to myself “how can I do something nice to the person in front of me”, because if I succeed I will get a smile. Then I will have my own genuine smile and it will help me.